Thought Leadership forIT Service Management Professionals

Align from top to bottom, with customers first: the fifth key to getting it right

Successful Service Asset and Configuration Management (SACM) begins with the customer. As with everything else involved in running a successful enterprise in a data-driven world, having the customer in mind is an important first step. And if you want customers to return, you must achieve efficiency and improve the effectiveness of your technology supporting them.

Start simple, consider your end users, and be flexible in terms of resources and costs

In my last post, I discussed two keys to help you get moving in the right direction for simplifying service asset and configuration management (SACM) – Key 1: Know why it hasn’t worked, and Key 2: Know why you are doing this. Now let’s move beyond the “why” and into the “what” to provide useful tips for the planning and implementation stages.

If you get the process of planning your service asset and configuration management (SACM) program right from the very start, you increase your chances of achieving a successful implementation. There will be roadblocks ahead, but also plenty of good opportunities for lessons learned along your journey. You will have policy, process and technology to design and build, so you should really think things through. And the process may be twice as hard and take twice as long as you may initially think, to get it right.

Therefore, be sure to start with something important, but manageable – this is the third key to simplified asset and configuration management. Limit the data by beginning with a manageable universe of data points that you can understand and manipulate, with manual intervention when necessary. For asset management, this might be one to three top software licenses, or a class of high value servers. And a focus on one to two high value, tier-1 type services (only ones that really matter) is the best way to structure your configuration management planning efforts.

Knowing why you care about asset and configuration management is the second key to getting it right.

A key purpose for keeping track of all asset and configuration information is to ensure and maintain delivery of services, which keeps your customers happy. This is the “why” behind your efforts to build an effective configuration and asset management program.

ITIL describes Service Asset and Configuration Management (SACM) like this: “the process responsible for ensuring that the assets required to deliver services are properly controlled, and that accurate and reliable information about those assets is available when and where it is needed. This information includes details of how the assets have been configured and the relationships between assets.”

I place emphasis on “deliver services” above because this is the crux of the challenge in effectively and accurately managing your IT assets and configurations.